Daniel Andrés López, "Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute" (Haymarket Books, 2020)

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Welcome to the new books network. Welcome back to new books and historical materialism. I am your host, Stephen Doseman. The Hungarian Marxist philosopher, George Lukac, has long occupied a complicated place in the Marxist canon of thinkers.

Both his lived and theoretical practice subject to much critical commentary and debate. While history and class consciousness is considered to be a classic of critical sociology, it has also often been held at arms linked by Marxists, many of whom find its use of Hegelian speculative philosophy unhelpful. While others find the overemphasis on praxis at the expense of other forms of life and inquiry reductive. In spite of these hesitations, the text has maintained a canonical status for a century now, leaving philosophers on the left with a difficult set of questions about how to read it and what to do with it.

Stepping into this difficult terrain is Daniel Andre Lopez with his massive book, Lukac, Praxis, and the Absolute. Lukac's work reconstructs Lukac's thought of the 1920s by putting it back into its tumultuous context, allowing us not only to get a close look at the theory, but its purpose in maintaining political, historical, and philosophical clarity in a world filled with war, revolution, and upheaval. Much like our current moment, Lukac occupied a time where everything seemed possible, but translating the infinite possibilities into concrete realities was a formidable challenge, and would require not only the courage to step into physical danger, but also political confusion. Nothing in this moment was guaranteed, so rigorous philosophical speculation was required, and Lukac stepped in to provide communists with a rigorous theoretical framework.

However, this book goes well beyond simply instructing Lukac's theoretical output. Rather than be satisfied with writing a straightforward commentary, this book is interested in wrestling with Lukac's successes and his limitations. To that effect, Lopez works through a number of critiques of Lukac, both of others as well as his own. This allows him to explore various other questions on the margins of Lukac's work about the relation between philosophical theory and political practice and the role of critical thinking in emancipatory movements.

The scope and rigor of the text as well as the various questions and themes it addresses will make this an incredible resource, not just for newcomers to Lukac or those seasoned in his thought, but for all those interested in learning how to think and how to translate that thinking into action. Daniel Andre Lopez is an honorary research associate with the thesis 11 forum for social and political theory. His work has appeared in a number of places, including the journal Historical Materialism. He is also an editor at Jacobin.

Daniel Lopez, welcome to the New Books Network. Thank you very much, Steven. Nice to begin. Yeah, so I always like to have guests introduce themselves at the beginning of episodes, so could you maybe tell listeners a little bit about yourself and what your work and research tends to focus on?

So I'm Daniel Lopez. I live in Melbourne, Australia. At the moment, I'm working as a contributor editor for Jackman Magazine, so that just involves commissioning content about Australia and other things as well. In terms of philosophy, I did my, I completed my PhD in 2018, and my book came out in 2019.

I've teaching philosophy still. At the moment, I'm focusing on the question of speculative Marxism, and I'm particularly interested in Julia Rose. Wonderful. So to kick things off, I want to kind of set the scene for why you decided to write this book.

You've said that you feel that Marxism, overall, as a political or philosophical orientation, is somewhat incomplete, that for all its rigor at helping us think about things like history, society, economics, there are certain blind spots or limitations to it that need to be supplemented, and for you, Hegel is really the person who Marxists need to pay attention to to help give them some extra theoretical help. Can you maybe explain what you think the theoretical limitations of Marxism are and what you think Hegel has to offer? Yeah, true. It's a big question, but I guess the way that I got into this when I was first conceiving of the book, well, if you look around at the various Marxist movements or socialist movements around the world, we're a very, very fragmented movement, and we haven't really had a lot of success in the last couple of decades.

There could be, there could be movements that may be changed or that they'd be inspired by people, but Marxism, although it has a logic within it that claims to be totalizing, that claims to understand society as a whole, the logic of history, et cetera, Marxism itself is intellectually extremely divided, politically quite divided between different traditions that go back to the 20th century. To my mind, that's evidence of an organic crisis within Marxism as a movement, as an intellectual movement. Now, to my mind, this isn't a reason to just leave Marxism behind, but it's a reason to start to think through the traditions and the remains that we've got from the 20th century. To say that no one of these traditions is the one truth.

No one of these traditions can claim to be the correct understanding of Marxism or the correct way to change the word, you name it, but they all have something different to offer us. But then on a deeper level than that, in a sense, there are some quite real and tangible failures associated with different types or currents within Marxism. We can't point to one of the major currents in it. I mean, social democracy, Bolshevism, Trotskyism, Maoism, you name it, you name it.

We can't really point to one that didn't on some level enter into a crisis in the late 20th century, the early 21st century. So I guess one of my arguments in the book is that that shows you something about historical logic to Marxism as an intellectual movement and to the, actually the logic of the left as a cultural with the modernity. So part of the problem, I think, is that Marxism or Marxists haven't typically developed concepts that can allow us to reflect upon the concepts that we use to understand the world. We have many concepts which understand the world, like God, read capital, the commodity, you know, you study exchange value, you name it, read German ideology, logic of history, or you read Lukas, rafication, etc.

So there's this very rich conceptual apparatus, and you know, this extends into people like Ramsey or Arthur's here or later Marxists than that. But within that, we haven't particularly developed a silph reflexivity about those concepts and an overview that would allow us to understand how they function within different systems of thinking. So I think the speculative philosophy, or Hegelian philosophy, gives us an opportunity for that. Yep, there are deeper reasons, I think, why perhaps Marxism needs Hegel, but I think maybe that'll come out imminently because part of what I was arguing is that limits to Lukas's efforts disclose the need for a philosophical standpoint within Marxism that we can then use to think through the way we see the world.

Yeah, jumping right off of that. So this book is focused on Lukas and his attempts to kind of develop a more Hegelian Marxism into that effect. You're really focused mostly on his work in the 1920s, in most, almost the main text there is, of course, his most famous text history and class consciousness. We're going to kind of tease out the theoretical developments he would make as time goes on, but I'm wondering if you could just kind of give us a sense of the basic project of helping left parties develop a more self-conscious orientation, and, and also the way for the college self-conscious self-consciousness required Hegelian dialectics.

Could you maybe give us an introductory sense of that project of using dialectics to develop this kind of more historical consciousness and self-reflexivity as you were just talking about? Yeah, well, that's a good question because a lot of the commentators on Lukasian particularly academic ones, they forget that during the 1920s he was a very active and involved member. The Communist movement, he was a leader in exile of Hungarian Communist Party. He wrote in German and he wrote in the Communist press.

So this is a guy that was participating in these struggles and in these movements. So to read history, class consciousness or any of his other texts from the 20s is purely philosophically, purely philosophy. That's, it mistakes the motivation behind and it mistakes what he was trying to do. When he converted to communism, he really put politics at the forefront.

So this isn't to say that he ignored others' years of life completely, culture of philosophy. What have you about? He said, we need to focus on the political limit, we need to effectively transformation throughout Europe. And ultimately this, again, looked like trying to reproduce the Russian revolution between different concrete circumstances.

So in a sense, there's something quite similar going on in Lukas to what was going on in Grapshin Italy. They both understood that to make the politics of the Russian revolution efficacious elsewhere, they needed to develop Marxism within local Communist parties that could grasp the actuality of their moment in the same degree of concrete detail that Lenin's party did in Russia. And they had the politics and the clarity to lead transformative social struggles and revolution on the basis of that. So this was also a very practical question in the 1920s and this sort of does get towards the role of philosophy.

If the Communist internationals had all sorts of debates in the early 1920s, there's a lot to left us on one side. There's people that are right on another side. There's all these questions about different countries about Germany, the German revolution, you name it. I guess Lukas has over all point, or the point of reading him, is to say that, well, within these different debates, there was no clear cut to methodology within the Marxist side.

So Lukas did take particular positions on different issues, that's fine, and all the different leaders would have done. But insofar as they were articulating strategies for different national contexts, they were doing so in a way that wasn't particularly reflexive and that was still, to some extent, dominated by, I guess, ideology in some way, relates to the way that the bourgeois society functions. To give you a concrete example of what that means, he reviewed Nikolay Bakarans book on historical materialism which came out in the early 20s, and makes an argument on the basis of that, that, well, Bakarans reproducing a methodology, a kind of empiricist methodology, that is inherited uncritically from bourgeois social science, and that this fails to see the transformative role that the working class can play in social struggle. So, yeah, for Lukas in the early 20s, turning to philosophy is a way to gain freedom and clarity vis-a-vis strategic debates in the Communist movement.

Philosophy is not the point. It's something that Marxists have to go through for him in order to be able to think critically and clearly about the concepts that they use in the world. The concepts that they use in articulating strategy and leading struggle. Yeah, turning to one of those kind of methodological tools, one thing that features strongly for you is what you call Lukas is literary historical method.

To this extent, you quote Lukas who gives a short summary of it. He writes quote, to ensure that the problems under consideration will arise before us dielectically, Lenin and Luxembourg provide what is substantially a literary historical account of their genesis. They analyze the changes and reversals in the views leading up to the problem as it presents itself to them. So, I think that the question is, is that the question is, is the question of the political process within a historical context, conditioning it and resulting from it?

This enables them to evoke with unparalleled vividness the historical process of which their own approach in their own solutions are the combinations. So, can you maybe unpack this approach or method Lukas has, and also maybe how it informs your own reading of Lukas? Yeah, sure. Well, the reason why, maybe I'll start with my own reading and then Lukas' method will emerge from that.

So, the question is, because of commitment to humanness. So, it frustrates me when you come across scholarly work on different philosophers or other work, for that matter, which is sort of eclectic or just sticks and chooses or introduces a standpoint totally external to those authors in order to assess them. I mean, they can be fine things done that way, but I wanted to find a method within Lukas with which to assess his work and to push his work beyond its own limits. So, I see that as an aspect of a fairly alien or speculative approach to criticism.

So, the point of the logical historical or literary historical method, I'll mention how it relates to Lukas second, for Lukas, is that it allows us to understand the text that we're looking at or the thing that we're looking at or perhaps moving or the thing that we're looking at or perhaps a movement that we're looking at, both in its totality, so its interior logical or literary totality. And I sort of see that as practicing a fidelity to the text. You know, we have to pay very close attention to what these people said. We have to try and grasp their ideas as a whole, including with those ideas of contradictory.

We have to try and show how the different elements of the aporias even of a text relate to the whole structure. But then, in addition to that, we have to situate it within history. And this doesn't just mean, you know, having a section at the beginning saying, oh, this is where this is going to fit into history. What Lukas means by history in this context?

He uses the term like running history in class consciousness, Genesis, to distinguish between history in a typical sense and history understood in a dialectical sense. Genesis is the conceptuality of the content of history understood. So, in my argument, the conceptuality of history that Lukas is work expresses is the October Revolution. And that tells us something about the moment of revolution in social transformation, class consciousness, the role of the party, so on and so forth.

So I've tried to unite both literary approach to practicing fidelity to the text, assembling Lukas as a totality from the 20s at any rate. And I've tried to explain how that relates to the conceptuality of his time and how those two things in my mind create attention within which the author can enter a dialogue with the text. So I think that's an important step to acknowledge because otherwise we sort of fetishize or reify the text itself and presuppose that there's some absolute truth within the text. We have to acknowledge the difference between ourselves and the text.

But at the same time, we have to do that without, I guess, retreating into the relativism or the eclecticism of simply proposing our own ideas in an open discussion with the text. You know, rather, what I wanted to do is to say, in so far as I'm going to criticize the guy, I'm going to try and find bases within his theory, within his philosophy, to criticize him. And the point there being, insofar as we can disclose contradictions or aporias, we're looking at within Lukas' theory, they reveal a certain truth about historical reality that he was involved in that may well be a truth that is relevant for us today. So I guess in the gaps of the text, history starts to speak.

That's part of how I see that method. I guess there's one or two other aspects of this method that I think are important. The point about reading a system is a totality, that is a logical totality. This doesn't mean disestablishing it.

When I began the project, I sort of had a tendency to establish a Lukasian Marxism or his philosophy practices like a perfect integral hole without flaws. That just ends up in a very schematic direction. You know, you can always find ways to defend a theory like that, but it just ends up removing it further and further from reality. But at the same time, by reproducing Lukas' thinking as a system, and he does actually say an introduction that there is a system at its identity as an history class consciousness.

By doing that, I think we can start to see some of the interiological structure. And then the big point I'd make there, the last one I'll make, is the key contradiction in Lukas' philosophy practice as a whole, for me, is the contradiction between theory and the theory. He wants to overcome philosophy, whereas I think his achievement is having created something that is in itself philosophical, implicitly philosophical. Jumping right off of that, to start kind of reconstructing Lukas' work in the 1920s, I think it's worth, as you say, kind of being attentive to historical context, especially given what was going on at the time.

This was a Europe that had just gone through a world war. There was the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. There was the attempted German Revolution. And just massive other issues in the wake of this massive, destructive war that had devastated economies and societies.

And within that, as you say, Lukas is really kind of a frontline organizer. He's not a philosopher outside of it. He's really trying to understand how to operate within this space that is constantly upheaving itself. Can you maybe just set the scene a bit so that we can better understand and appreciate the situation Lukas was trying to philosophize about and understand?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, so the October Revolution has happened in 1917, and that was a lightning bolt throughout all of Europe. And that impacted hugely undercuts. Before that, Lukas was a very unhappy man.

You might call him an existentialist, and that coin wasn't particularly in circulation back then, but he was very interested in it. I can't even philosophy. His focus was aesthetics, was literature. And in a lot of ways, I think he exemplified the cultural crisis and the intellectual crisis that Europe was going through.

And it kind of allow his book on Lukas has a very, very good discussion of this intellectual video that Lukas was part of. Many of whom went to the radical left, some of whom went to the radical right of effect. So the October Revolution happens, but then later on it's echoed in Hungary and Hungary and Soviet Republic, and Lukas has joined the Communist Party, Hungary and Communist Party just before that. And so very quickly, he's giving lectures to hundreds and hundreds of workers as part of a revolution.

He becomes a deputy, comes up with culture in a very short lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. He fights in Hungarian civil war. He even organizes underground briefly within Hungary despite the fact that he was quite well known, and that was a huge risk for him. Before he goes into exile and is involved with organizing Hungarian Communist Party in exile.

So the big challenge here is to try and replicate the Russian Revolution in other countries to lead to a victory of workers power. And what Lukas means by that as well is, and people miss this, he's got a very radically democratic approach towards communism. This guy wants the Soviets to rule. He wants workers' councils to rule.

It's a radical democratic legal form that he wants to rule. And he's a counterpart of the party, which we'll talk about in a second. He's got a very democratic account of the party. So these are the kinds of things he's trying to work through.

In a way as well, he's quite a new to Marxism. He already read some marks in the 1910s during the war. But when he becomes a communist, he's got a real ultra-left or messianic flavor about it. So he does take a number of years to work through Marxism as a body of thought and in combination with the alien philosophy.

And so I guess his organs then is the intellectual leadership of the Communist movement following World War I. He also writes like many, many journalistic articles, most of which haven't been translated and re-published. So again, this guy isn't just pitching to the philosophers in the party. He's pitching to everybody really.

And he's involved in a lot of practical work. I'll give you one example of why that mattered for developing his ideas. So I mentioned he began his political career as something of an ultra-left or messianic or whatever you want to call it. But at one point in Hangarion Communist Party, next I'll do is debate between Lukas and his ally, Janor Landler.

And then on the other side, there was Beyla Coon, who was the, I guess, Comintern-approved Hangarion Communist Party leader. And Beyla Coon wanted to introduce a requirement that effectively that Communist Party members must not pay dues to the Social Democratic Control Union. That's in Hungary. Now, this was, you know, Beyla Coon justified this on all sorts of ultra-radical basics, you know, the Social Democrats.

You know, a large part of the men in Germany back in the war, you know, in Hungary, they were inconsistent opponents of the dictatorship, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a moral argument for this, but Lukas looks at this and he's horrified, saying, if Hangarion workers have to do this, now effectively the outing themselves as Communist in a dictatorial regime. It's a kind of moralistic, ultra-left stance. So Lukas sees that.

And because of the exigencies of organizing on the ground, he says, this is crazy. We cannot do this. So he develops a much more mediated and concrete approach towards revolutionary politics that doesn't rest on abstracting junctions, but it's a very interesting way to address the situation of what it is and find a pathway within that to developing the class conscious work as we Yeah, to start kind of reconstructing a theory a bit. One place I think it might be helpful to start is what you call, you've got a couple terms that come up for one, the quantitative immediacy of capitalism, as well as the common sense empiricism.

And at times, this is a critique of kind of bourgeois economics and the sort of apologetics that can come along with that. But it also seems to be, for Lukasch, kind of a starting point for a lot of people living under capitalism, that it has this sort of appearance that can be very seductive and appealing and hard to break. But it's really important for Lukasch to kind of understand where people are at politically consciously, et cetera. Can you maybe unpack this starting point for people living under capitalism, this kind of everyday conscious orientation?

Yeah, yeah. So there's different terms going on around. I guess the broad concept that we're talking about is rafication, which is a specific type of alienation for Lukasch. Rafication is the type of alienation endemic to capitalist societies.

So market-based commodity producing exchanging societies, you know, use money, you name it. And a lot of his ideas about rafication, I think the biggest influence is George Simmel, who was a neo-cantian sociologist, who's great, you know, people should bring him. But effectively, the issue with rafication is that we produce our means of subsistence arrangement from each other. This was trying to feel as well, you know, well, to some extent, it varies.

But under capitalism, you know, you do it for a wage. You go to work. And your labor time, whatever the concrete thing that you're doing is, is measured quantitatively, according to time. Not according to the thing that you've produced, not according to the human relationships that you have with workmates or with whoever is employing you.

It's measured according to time. So this is like Marx's political economy, right? But this means that we, you know, Lukasch doesn't really do the political economy, so it says, well, Marx has already done this, or has done this, you know, that's fine. He's more interested in the culture questions of consciousness.

So this creates a society in which we instinctively relate to everything and everyone on, first and foremost, on a quantitative level. You know, how much does this cost? It's reminiscent of early Marx, you know, where he sort of argues that any quality, any human quality, like intelligence, strength, beauty, whatever, can be bought, because they're embodied in commodities. So this is the immediacy of how we relate to society as a whole.

You go out of the shops, you go to work, you get money, and you treat, and this gives rise to, you know, this isn't purely an economic thing. This gives rise to political and cultural forms. The political equivalent of the commodity is the citizen. The individual abstract unit that makes up a polity, and it has, is the bearer of rights.

So a citizen is not a concrete person, you know, doesn't say anything about their life, their human connections, you know, who they are, what they think or anything like that. It's just a simple, you know, a simple abstraction. You know, in the same way as a dollar is a simple abstraction. Or for example, with the legal system, you know, the cash, he does pinch this argument from Max Weber, really.

You know, the legal system and capitalism is built effectively as a quantitatively, calculable and rational bureaucracy. So this doesn't mean it's genuinely rational. You know, we're on the left, we know that, but it does mean that courts basically have to provide a relatively predictable and objective and abstractly universal framework within which to ameterate disputes to do with crime, etc. This is necessary for the function of the market.

So you can make an investment and you can predict that you're probably will be secure, that the app that you'll be able to sell, and you know, you're going to be ripped off, so on and so forth. So this creates, I guess, the standard orientation of capitalist society is a kind of liberal, empiricist rationalism, because it's all built because it's built on a system of atomized individuals who relate to the world abstractly and universally. This is very different from other social systems. You know, you think about feudalism, it's not like that, it's like, you know, it's radical to be a rationalist against feudalism.

Now, the other issue with this, this picture, Lukas paints, is that we think about where does reification come from, or where do these social forms come from? The human practices, their social relationships. But because they systematically, capitalism systematically isolates each individual from other individuals, you know, the sort of the common marks, it's one second, you know, you'll go down to the supermarket and you'll be confronted by hundreds and hundreds of different commodities who have all been made by workers everywhere. And you, all of these relationships are just invisible, they're all just concealed behind transactions.

Or even when you go to work, you know, half the time you might not meet other people that you're working with, or you won't know people that work with the same company across the country. So because capitalism isolates us from each other and effectively operates on the basis of social relationships that have been established in the past, the seeming permeable, it starts to feel natural. It starts to feel, this is just the way things are. This is the way things have always been, on some level, perhaps, an expression of ecumen nature, or, you know, some eternal fact about societies.

And so we're confronted in society by accumulations of facts. Things just, you know, look at some facts, and they seem to be objective, they seem to be the truth. In fact, facts are really just a creature of past practice. Some facts are about that, you know, Lukaszia's not, he's often characterised as somebody who just wants to do great effects into, into faith, which is a grain of truth about.

And so it's really the guy did actually have an attention to facts. But the problem with this is who chose the facts and who's created the facts. This would be Lukaszia's question. You know, like there's all sorts of common examples of this.

Like, when you look at unemployment statistics, they're almost always massively underestimated, or they can see all things like, you know, under employment. Or when you look at, you know, breakdowns of wealth, sure, they might portray inequality, but they don't particularly portray who owns capital in a given society. So these kinds of common sense immediate facts, I guess they're the bread and butter of different forms of politics, which on some level could have a table of capitalism, different conservatism to liberalism to social democracy, you know. Yeah, I want to jump right off of that.

So you've been talking about kind of this alienating aspect of capitalism, this reified subject. So kind of to develop this a little more. So for Marx commodities had both this quantitative and qualitative character in Luke, which is tracking this way in which subjects under capitalism also have it. And you've been saying this is kind of a source for alienation, but at the same time for Lukasz, it's kind of two sides to this coin where this is also a possible source of emancipation, or at least emancipatory thinking kind of people starting to think more critically about their situation.

And even if it doesn't immediately just turn into revolution right away, it is kind of the starting point for Lukasz of workers, maybe thinking more critically about how to organize and what sort of society they would want to occupy. Can you kind of speak to this dual aspect of it or the San Pivlanc to fork in the road? Yeah, okay, so let's start on the side of commodities, and then I'll talk a little bit about what Lukasz calls the contemplative stance. So, okay, so commodities is a, it's a use value, but that is, that is valued according to exchange value.

So I'm not going to go through the first three chapters of capital, but keep this in mind. But the use value is the qualitative side. The use value is the side that meets some concrete quality. It's a nice guitar, it plays good music.

You know, it's a beautiful car, or maybe it's a shit car, not all commodities have to be good. But that's the qualitative side. And because these things cannot be compared, because they're qualitatively different, I mean this guitar is better than that guitar, this car is better than that car. Fine.

But that's not a basis of which to compare them within the market. So the quantitative side, the exchange value, I guess, you know, that's what matters for economics. The qualitative side however is that part of it which embodies different human values. And you can see a similar sort of bifurcation in social structures.

So, you know, we'll take a university. The qualitative side of a university, if you like the ideological side, is the side that purports to contribute to universal human knowledge, you know, reason to develop freedom, a sort of a cosmopolitan discourse of scholars, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The quantitative side is the side that's interested in making money from degrees. That's interested in, you know, you know, that kind of thing.

So this bifurcation means that these two sides come into conflict with each other. So this is about the objective one. This doesn't really tell us what's going on with consciousness yet. So to describe the way that this social setup impacts upon people, Lukasjes are the term the contemplative stance.

This is the default subject position for all individuals within capitalism, the argues. Now, of course, this comes to be very differently in people with different class backgrounds, different life experiences. You know, so he's not saying everyone has got the same relationship, like you want to get capitalism. And as well, it's important to note that the contemplative stance, kind of what it would denote being passive in a lot of readers minds, it's not necessarily true.

You know, it can actually be a very, very active position. What he really means, you know, there's all sorts of, you know, approaches to the world that Lukasjes describes that are hyperactive even, but whose activity doesn't touch the core or the essence. Of capitalism as a social structure, you know, whose movement is superficial. So, you know, what matters with the contemplative stance is that insofar as we're within this stance as individuals, and as well as not just a personal choice together, it's, you know, it's a fact of life, really.

We are divorced from any meaningful control or any meaningful role in producing the social relationships, the structure of our lives. And so this reduces the position of observance insofar as we can be active, we can be active in our own interests, you know, for example, starting a business or, for example, willing ourselves to go to work every day. But there are more radical forms of it, you know, one, you could drop out of society. You know, you can become an activist, that's probably a better choice.

So that's sort of the contemplative stance. And that also reproduces the divide between quality and quantity. So if you think, I guess a very, you know, humdrum run of the milliprope type of individual would be just a business owner who there is quality, or there are qualitative values in that person's life, who knows what they might be, that person's family, it might be, you know, saving up money for a nice house, it might be simply a commitment to the self expansion of value and the desire to become a capitalist. So there is a qualitative life purpose within this, this individual fits their energy and their work to, I guess, feeding within the quantitative logic of capitalism, you know, they try and succeed within it.

I mean, as far as that's the case, yeah, they're really united, but their role is a source of power to them. For the working class, and this is also true for press groups, although in different ways, our experience of the quantitative side of capitalism is dehumanizing. It becomes intolerable, life sucks, it's, you know, kind of what live, work goes worse, what have you. And the qualitative element that remains is the element of freedom with which we motivate ourselves to go to work.

So capitalism is not a system of direct, direct physical compulsion in the same way that a system based around slavery is, it's a capitalism system that requires us to freely will ourselves to go to work to have a role within the saliva to be a part of our exploitation. But that freedom is a remainder of quality, for the human quality of freedom, that we can start to turn against the quantitative logic of capitalism. Now that's also where I introduce in the book an important distinction, because when Lukas talks about the proletariat or the standpoint of the proletariat, in some ways, I think he's doing two things. He's describing empirically existing such class, so we could talk about class consciousness in any given context, his context, what have you, and we could talk about the way the classes form consciousness.

But he's also talking about effectively he is a theorist who is imputing this standpoint to an empirical class. So as an individual, Lukas has a particular relationship to the contemplative stance, and as an individual, he's someone who has committed himself to the working class and to to class struggle. So I think also within his theory, we do need to account for the role of someone like Lukas, like a theorist. And he wasn't a working class guy, he was from a very wealthy background.

There's a bond in his name, he was actually in his family, mind and ability, but I think they were like to the party, they were capitalist. So within some likely cash, well let me put it this way, there are many different ways of life or approaches to life that combine the quantitative and qualitative elements of the contemplative stance and kind of unique ways, and George Sim was a really good source for some of these. You know, you could be one could be an artist and live a life directed towards the pure quality of aesthetic value, and then how you fit within sort of a quantified economic systems and other questions. You could be radical activist, in which case your value is ethical, and your lifestyle might be lived around that ethical pursuit.

For Lukas, the theorist and of course as an activist as well, the qualitative element is I suppose the ability to reflect intellectually on the subjective freedom the capitalism has given us, but I was talking about before, and the ethical commitment to become an activist for the working class, which in his mind is a class that can end in human situation. So interestingly there are pathways within the kind of distance that he outlines both for the proletariat, but then also for the for the for the intellectual, you know, for a theorist like Lukas outside that give us a way to criticize that stance and ultimately he would practically transform it. And so to develop the theory here a little more for Lukas, you outline four elements of theory that are required for it to not only, you know, develop a proper understanding of a situation but also kind of turn into praxis that is capable of actually changing the world war, producing a revolution. We've been using some of these terms but I think it's worth pausing to kind of unpack them and also talk about how they interrelate.

So for you the four main terms are praxis mediation, totality and genesis. Traxis is obviously central for Lukacian in a way kind of the goal. Genesis is a kicking off point and then mediation and totality are both required as well. Can you maybe give us a quick understanding of these terms and how they work together for Lukac to form this kind of overall worldview that's capable of producing some sort of revolutionary activity.

Yeah, so these terms operate in different ways, different levels of Lukacian theory. So for example, in his discussion of German idealism, he basically I think conducts a philosophical reflection on how these terms emerge through Kant and Victor, and then culminating with Marx. Whereas they're also operative in some of the most sociological elements of this theory. But also go through the terms one by one.

I say that because to understand them properly, you sort of have to understand the way that they develop within his overall philosophy. But that's what the book saw. I guess the founding conviction of Lukacian's philosophy praxis is an intuitive or immediate ethical commitment to praxis. You know, he can see that humanity is out of control of the world.

He can understand that what's needed is a practical movement that can overthrow things and that can reform society. And he's got this deep commitment to it. But it's not a worked out commitment. At the beginning of the philosophy praxis, it's not something that he's worked through rationally.

It's a commitment. It's an immediate commitment. In the same way as if you join a movement, you have an immediate commitment to that movement and then you have work to do to figure out what's going on, what are the issues? You know, who's leading it?

Is there a strategy? How do we understand it for things? So then the next step would be mediation. Mediation in Lukacian has a similar weight to negation in Hegel.

It's to be able to critique, I can't say how many people use that word as a verb, but I should not put it myself. It's to criticise this, that, the other social phenomenon. Now, of course, like everyone can do this in all sorts of different ways. But the key thing with mediation with Lukacian is mediation has to be a concrete mediation.

It's not just an abstract rejection of things. It's not saying, I don't like this public transport ticket to Thuyuhi. This sucks. It's not really that.

I mean, that's a pretty good move. But it's much more saying, how does the thing I criticise, how does that disclose a deeper social logic? So declining wages and the increased wages decline over the last couple decades, in Australia, it's the case in Australia, it's the case in case it's pretty much declining. It's really part of the liberalism.

As wages decline, the share of national profits that goes to capital go up. That's a simple critique that most socialists will be able to make of society. Well, then the key there is grasping the concrete mediation between declining wages and the social totality. So mediation gives rise to the concept of totality.

An interesting way to talk about totality is they're all sorts of spurious or ideological totality's in currency today, and they're often allied with abstract, what Lukacian might call abstract mediations. So you take sort of the conspiracy theorists around the coronavirus. They'll criticize the vaccine, and I say, oh, well, this is some sort of Chinese plot or somehow Bill Gates is involved. I don't really know somehow this relates to big pharma, and there's an increasingly totalising world view there, which often tends in a fairly far right direction.

The issue here is there are no concrete mediations. No one can say here is how distributing a vaccine with microgibs and there's obviously microgibs. Here's how this concretely relates to XYZ, political movement or company or what have you. The totality that's presented is basically in the aesthetic totality.

It's a picture of the world that suits the psychological needs of the actors that put it forward. And there's also other abstract fatalities, like for example, if you were to take as your starting point, the nation is a totality. You might end up with something slightly more sophisticated than the anti-vaxxers, but this is still an ideological totality. To a degree is artificial.

So the point for Lukasz of concrete mediation is outlining the real connections between different social phenomena and the totality. Now, the issue with this is we have a picture of totality that is a picture. It's a representation of a social reality that's extremely complex. And if you like no one work of theory can capture the intricacies of a whole social system.

You'd be tempted to write a new encyclopedia and then the moment you've finished someone who pointed out what was wrong with it. So Lukasz talks about an aspiration toward totality. We complete a totalising picture and we make it more rich as our movement develops. So he's also discussing really a collective intellectual project here.

That's another point I think it's worth making. In fact, we have these different pictures of totality. They are theoretical hypotheses about the actual structure of totality, the concrete totality. This is why there are debates within Marxist political analysis, political economy, historical analysis, you name it.

Because we may all be on one level making claims about the relationship between different phenomena and totality, but they won't all be right. Some will be wrong. But we would hope that that actually comes more concrete over time. The way that this is through its practical involvement in history for one.

So there's a practical test going on. But two, as well to understand that the totality itself is in a process of development. So we don't have a static social totality where we have a social totality that is itself fractured. There's a itself in some ways open and in some ways closed in which some parts concrete to the whole, you know, in which there can be imminent crises within that.

And this is because this totality is a historical product. It's been made by us and it's been made in circumstances not about choosing. So then comprehending this gets you to Genesis. So the way in which historical totality is constructed.

This is a very important sort of de-raifying moment or way to counter ideology because it means seemingly eternal facts about society are relatively prioritised and historicised. But then to really grasp that as well, we have to grasp the historical logic going on. For example, how do different classes relate to each other in struggle? How the economic needs of a nation marginalised certain social groups of classes give others power, you know, so that's sort of the criteria of Genesis.

Ultimately then to test our theoretical arguments about totality in Genesis, to test our picture of the world, to test our analysis of the world, the analysis of the world has to rise to meet a practical force that can make that critique actual. They can actually start to reshape the world. So really what we're talking about here, I mean a theorist can try and do this and the theorist can be involved in some forms of access themselves. You know, what does Mark say?

You go hunting in the morning, you go to a demonstration in the afternoon, you're at a double, I don't know. But really what Luke has just talking about is the working class change of the world, but also in dialogue with a revolutionary party or a Leninist party. So that trachements the ultimate test of any theoretical hypothesis of the world, is that it culminates in praxis. And then of course it has a very political definition of praxis.

Do you want to unpack that understanding? Yeah, go ahead. Okay, cool. Well, this is also interesting because it gets to the party in class question.

And most of the academic commentators on Luke Hush attack one look at his boss who is a mega, this man is an authoritarian and he's a boss who can be done like this. Maybe we like the term reification a little bit, I don't know, maybe not. But most of the academics discard his boss who is an interesting, there's an inverse phenomenon when you come to the far left readings of Luke Hush. There's a handful of written by intellectuals in the far left who love his boss who is a who don't really understand his philosophy.

But they just like the boss who is an equal to their politics. Fine, whatever you could do with us. With Luke, for Luke Hush, he's got a very interesting account of Leninism and of volativism and it is radically democratic. And there's only been a few commentators that have really noticed this.

Melan Ponte was probably the first in his essay, Western Marxism, which is in the book, Adventures of the Dialectic, which is a really, really good essay. It's one of the best out there. But then some of the more recent commentators like Constantine Nauskavilakis, like he gets the look at his radical democrat. And what this means is for Luke Hush the proletariat is the subject object of history potentially.

He doesn't think it's the way it's the case, but if the proletariat goes through a process of class struggle and development towards class consciousness, which is a complicated process. There are strikes, general strikes, then the work last moment has to figure out its relationship to different distinct political issues. So in his time, the land question, the national question, and how do we do about the war, those kinds of questions. The working life itself has to go through this process of self-education through struggle in order to get to a point where it can start to approach its historic role as the subject object of history.

But then at the same time, the party goes through a process of imminent development itself. And this is the way, I guess you could call this the desublimation of theory by practice. So the founding moment of a revolutionary party, I mean the really early moment, like the Russian social democratic party, you know, in the 1980s, the 1980s, the 1980s. You've got the kind of manual about the need for Marxism in Russia and telling them to run the Xwether or wrong because they're very capital.

So like, you know, a party is founded by a theoretical moment. Like it's first and foremost a representation of the theory. But then in that initial moment, that theory is extremely abstract. And it's like literally the kind of running a reading group on capital, right?

You know, go to that guy's reading group on capital, but this doesn't really tell you what you need to know in order to actually change Russia. So then as that party develops through the early 1900s, through the 1905 revolution, during the war, and as it gets bigger, as it evolves itself in more struggles, he doesn't lose the theory. But it disuplimates the theory. The theory becomes deeply imbricated with practical movements.

You know, and this means developing a much more concrete and complex analysis of the different issues in Russia. This is all by the way, in Lukasz's book on Lenin, Lenin and the study of the unity of his thoughts. This is sort of, that's the historical example that he's got in mind, including in history and class consciousness. And so the party insofar as it, it conquers its theory through bringing it closer to reality and building a richer picture of reality by gaining members.

The party hopes that it can prove its theoretical, its analysis of objectivity, of social objectivity, it hopes that it can prove that by successful leading struggle. And this is a totally voluntary democratic relationship between party and class. The party approaches the working class in whatever way. I mean, I'm using slightly schematic terms here because party members will be part of the working class if you're dealing with mass party.

But party members in a given city or any good workplace will turn up and go, this is what we need to do. Here are the key issues facing us. There's ours. We need democracy.

We need the L.A.A. Day. We need to give peasants land, what have you. Here's what to fight around.

And insofar as they have a good picture of reality, they will win in practice. And thus, you know, gain popularity and gain respect. And so Lukaszia's picture of the emergence of praxis is effectively a dialectic between party and class. In which both sides, in a most general sense, the party represents theory and the class represents practice.

But of course, within each of those, a party has a practical component. You know, like working class people obviously have theories and they think about the world, you know, they're not just your practitioners. So the outcome of this ideally is praxis. This does imply a quite specific definition of praxis.

Now, you know, if you like a successful strike is praxis, like there will have been a theoretical hypothesis about the conditions of the workplace, what needs to be done, you know, his heart fits with legality, his object demand, his work with need to be done. And so we should demand, he's the work we need to do to get it involved, then it works really well. Oh, this is good theory guided practice. That works.

That's praxis. Sure. But fully actualized praxis, a fully realized praxis for Lukaszia is a kind of practice that can alter the social totality and that can start to consciously grasp history. So a strike doesn't really do that.

You know, it's certainly better than not striking, but the strike doesn't change the social totality. Whereas a general strike does start to. And an insurrection really does. So that's why praxis for Lukaszia's highest level is political.

And the highest form of praxis for Lukaszia is the democratic decision by the proletariat to back a party that wishes to lead a working class to the party. And establish a work of state. I think that's an interesting ambiguity in that term, because I think Lukaszia does tend to exclude the role of the sovereign and the role of someone like Lin. Even though he's a Bolshevik and he's very much a pro-Leninist, I think he does tend to invest in the proletariat where he does tend to argue that the proletariat has the final decision-making status.

And I think this does tend to align the decision made by the party in Russia. But nonetheless, that's his definition of praxis. And so for Lukaszia, that's the culmination of all of history. That is the highest term in his philosophy.

The point of it all is to get to praxis. And praxis isn't this absolute consciousness. Well, he does actually argue that the concept of praxis should take over the truth claims of the Hegelian absolute. But he doesn't think it should do so in a way that's finally totalising or that's monolithic.

Praxis is really just the significance of the predominance of conscious human control over historical unconsciousness. To refer back to the famous Hengels quote, it marks the realm of freedom as opposed to the realm of necessity. Praxis is a transition point in which humans begin for the first time to consciously make our world. But of course, we can never do so in an all-knowing way.

But that's the turning point for Lukaszia. Yeah, I want to loop back to something you said earlier about for Lukaszia. The decision to join a movement or join a political party, there is a lot of theoretical work that eventually needs to be done. But for him, it starts out in somewhat un-theoretical fashion.

It's almost a sort of religious decision. And Kierkegaard comes up a couple times in your discussion of some of his own personal biography. I'm wondering if you could talk about this kind of almost religious or spiritual initial starting points people will have with these sorts of left-wing movements for the future. And how that is then supposed to turn into a more sustainable theoretical vision.

Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure that everyone that joins a, let's talk about socialist or communist movements. I'm not sure everyone that joins a socialist or communist movement does so in the manner of a religious conversion. I mean, to say that might overextend the comment, maybe you could make a case like that.

But, you know, just as well, someone in the special deal with an ass movement, they may join it because it answers questions that have faced them in their neighborhood when they workplace. They may be friends with socialists. They may be socialists at their work. They may be socialists that organize movements that they respect and they join it because it answers immediate questions.

In a sense, with someone like that, there is a decision to join a movement that's greater than them that knows more than them. So maybe there's an element of faith in that. But like the way the Lukas joined the movement was particularly religious and particularly red-alent of a conversion. I guess then, well, I'll try and talk about this in terms of Lukas's biography, but while relating it to his theory.

So, as I mentioned before, Lukas was a pre-annabigae. He came from a very privileged background because he was extremely culturally attuned, so he's from Hungary, which has an interesting status within Europe. Hungarian intellectuals on the left did not like Hungary. They saw it as a very backwards, very isolated country and they would usually, you know, Germanophiles.

They thought that Hungary and culture needed to be improved with German culture. You know, German philosophy. Lukas was obsessed with classical German idealism, the German literary tradition, etc. But then, you know, Lukas, I guess, was always homeless in the world.

Until he became a communist, he was very homeless in the world. You know, he found it very difficult to find a vacation that was stable. He sort of felt excluded from a lot of the social circles that he was in. He had some fairly tumultuous relationships.

One of his early lovers, Emma Sideler, and Kütterseuside, and that had a huge impact on him. It wasn't, she did so for her own reasons. It wasn't particularly because of her relationship with Lukas. That had a huge impact on him and then had a second relationship with the Russian social revolutionary terrorist who was a fanatic who sounds like, you know, she was a very difficult person to be with.

And so, you know, Lukas is sort of feeling empty and spiritually barren. And interestingly, there is a parallel between that and my main Lukas's life, I think, and the kind of spiritual emptiness that Lukas sees in the experience of the workday for the proletariat. So, in a sense, the individual who's trapped in a contemplative position with any particular theorist can achieve, I think, in Lukas, a similar kind of self-emptying as a working as the class, as people in the working class might experience as part of their workday. That doesn't, of course, mean that intellectuals, you know, as a subject of history, they're still just intellectuals.

In a sense, it's kind of like a conscious radicalization of the inner emptiness of subjective freedom and capitalism. And this, you know, emptiness prepared Lukas for a conversion experience. So, as a result of this, and he sort of goes through different, he experiments with different possibilities for addressing this in emptiness. You know, he sort of despairs, he's not an artist, he's not a writer, he knows that he can't really do that.

Maybe there's a part of him that I'd like to, but he's a critic, you know, this is before he's a Marxist. And he just sort of despairs of the remove between the critic and the work of art. He sort of despairs that, well, we can't produce epic works of art anymore, you know, the novel is a bourgeois form, as he famously argues. You know, he sort of despairs as well that he, as an individual, seems to be incapable of taking the radical and extreme ethical action that he thinks is necessary.

Again, privateing a Marxist is necessary to, you know, ending capitalism and bringing like birthing a newer and higher form of civilization. So, he sort of, you know, he's, he can't do any of these things. Then the communist movement comes along. And then finally, the guy's ready, he takes a leap, he joins the communist movement.

There's a fascinating essay, Bolshevism is a moral problem. He published this just before the Hungarian Revolution, which he criticized the Bolshevism for its willingness to use violence and to kill. Because it's a really, you know, cratidian kind of almost liberal critic of Bolshevism. He revises the essay once the revolution's happened, not in a utilitarian direction.

He doesn't say, oh, yes, well, you know, we might kill some people, but in the end it's good, because humanity would be free. He says, yeah, no, we'll kill some people. And that's the absolute sin. And we have to take that on and fully confront that sin that we have to commit.

And he refers to a Hungarian playwrights version of the Judith story from the Old Testament. And the Hungarian playwright puts words in Judith's mouth. So Judith killed Holoferny's who was a varking, threatening, the Israelites. And so this Hungarian playwright has Judith say, well, if God replaces a sin between me and his command, who am I to disagree?

I've paraphrased, but that's basically the thing. So, you know, Lukas throws himself into the communist movement. It's someone who is, he sees himself as ethically corrupt almost. Like, you have to take on this sin in order to create a world that's beyond sin.

It's free of sin. So, you know, he's holding reading groups in the government building in the Hungarian South Revolution. This is according to a service that saw him, where he's talking about how communist are the equivalent of Jesus Christ and they have to be crucified for the revolution. So, you know, it's pretty spicy.

It's pretty, pretty weird stuff. And it's kind of cool. But he wasn't, he was, he was not gupless about it either. Like when he went in for the front lines, well, he put into practice his commitment to the need for violence.

He wasn't particularly violent, but like he, you know, one of them, he organized a court martial for deserters because they're undermining morale on the front line. But then also because he was part of the Red Army who were trying to kill the white army, you know, he understood, well, I'm trying to take other people's lives or I'm part of an effort to, you know, fight. So, he insisted on that the other side had to have the right to take his life as well. So, he walked above the trenches, expressed himself to enemy fire.

So, you know, these ethical gestures are sort of very religious. And there's a degree of self-destruction going on in these things, I think. So, this religious, this sort of conversion moment committed him to a vision of praxis that then I think he articulates and gives theoretical grounding throughout the 1920s. Because that initial ethical and quasi-religious commitment to it is really not enough.

And in a sense, the self-contradiction involved in that stance is, well, look how should we commit it to a universal project? Right? Well, if you commit it to a universal project on a religious, you know, a theological basis, and if your connection to that project is mediated by faith, then it's all too easy to simply project the contents of your own soul onto the universal movement. In which case, you're committed to a universal.

It's a universal that is actually covertly a psychological need. So, in order to be genuinely committed to the working-class movement and to socialism, Lukas had to work out the objectivity of that movement and how it actually functioned. And that meant overcoming a purely faithful or faith-based relationship with the movement. Of course, I'm using, in a sense, this is one quick point to make about the sense of religion.

We're not talking about a transcendent god, we're talking about communism. And so, in that sense, this is like a political theology, but then, you know, God is dead. So, theology has to emerge in different spheres. Yes, yes.

Yeah, really kind of interesting stuff to kind of follow up with that and also loop back in what you were saying earlier about the importance of the party. For Lukas, the party plays a really important role in kind of taking this original decision to commit oneself to the sort of political movement, but helping cultivate it, cultivate consciousness a little more, give people a much clearer sense of how to understand their situation, how to act within it. And I want to bring this up partly because I think people often assume the job of a political party is to give its members work to do, and that's certainly part of it, but it's also really to train their members, to teach them theory, to teach them how to think critically, to teach them how to do work. So kind of taking this initial decision of commitment and kind of cultivating it into a much more serious militant sort of organizer.

Can you maybe speak to that aspect of the party and its importance in kind of building people up as organizers? Oh, yeah. This isn't going to be interesting. Yeah, okay.

Because in practice, well, the communist movement in Europe certainly did this. I think possibly Lukas overstated the extent to which it did, and I think it's a one side in his account of it, and I think this does relate to some of the criticisms that I make of his philosophy of practice. But I'll start with the picture that he envisaged for the communist movement. So, okay, you join a party, you do a lot of educational work, you're also involved in practical work, Lukas gave lectures while a communist, he read texts for the communist press, like he's heavily involved in some of his work.

And he also has opinions about some of the practical organizing work. And we're dealing with movements of hundreds of thousands of people here predominantly working class, a lot of Europe's avant-garde ended up in the communist values as well. So party members in this context, they're joining a political community that seeks its own self-education so that it can more efficiently lead struggle and liberate people. For Lukas, this means membership of a political community that begins to overcome the abstraction inherent to bourgeois politics in which we relate to each other purely formally as bearers of rights and as abstract individuals.

Instead, you're part of a community where concretely connected with each other, where our opinions really matter and where through our ongoing relationships we can learn from each other and we can develop over time. Let me put it this way, democracy, this is my view, only really makes sense in terms of the self-education of the community that is organized democratically, whereas typically liberal, if you have democracy says, well we need democracy because everyone's equal, and that's the only way to mediate between equal individuals. Well, yeah, true, everyone's equal in rights, that's good, that's important. Not everyone is equal in terms of their opinions or in terms of the quality of their politics or the quality of their contribution, so that's not a reason to deny people.

But I think from Marxist, the point of democracy is to learn through discussion with each other, and then this can particularly happen in a concrete and embedded community, and that could be within a workplace as well, it could be within a locality that could be within different spheres of the world, but this is meant to happen in a party. And then partly this also means learning through experience. I don't know if you've been in a few movements and you've come up against the problem of sectarianism or the problem of a more conservative or right attitude towards different social forces, state, unions, what have you, and you can have a theoretical critique of these things, but to really round that out, you have to see what it does in practice, what these kinds of things are going to do in practice. That's sort of an ultimate test of that theory.

So then if that is successful, then in Lukas' view, the community of the party can actualize that initial commitment to liberation that its members have by making it more concrete, making it more effective in the real world. And ultimately this means we know that a majority of the workers movement and establishing institutions like workers councils or like, they might be others these days, in which people can, I guess there's one political scientist from the states whose name I forget, who's got a very analytic friend, so that when he tries to acknowledge his wife, he uses the term strong democracy as opposed to a weak democracy, a strong democracy being one in which we know the people with whom were involved in the democratic decision making process, and so we can learn over time. And so party's views can be compared over time in a meaningful and serious way. That's kind of a vision that Lukas has for the Communist movement.

To give you one other example of what this means, well, then the role of theory within this and the role of philosophy within this, this gives us concrete freedom vis-a-vis the categories that we use to understand the world. What does that mean? The best clear example of this in Lukas' writing is the SA on legality and illegality in history class consciousness. So when you're in a movement, you sometimes might have to consider doing something illegal.

I mean individually, but I mean like a strike, strike sometimes right the law, certainly in Australia, strikes are heavily restricted. Oftentimes a strike will break the law. Or there could be other occupation. You want to occupy vice-f neutral's office?

That's not legal. And in a more intense period of struggle, there could be factions within a common movement that gravitate to one's some sort of ultra-velitancy where they want to provoke struggle or the ones that are kind of a volunteerism, what have you, the could break laws in different ways. So you come up against the question of legality and illegality. Well, you've immediately got differing abstract alternatives.

You've got one alternative which fetishizes illegality. So it says, well, how could anyone see to the legality of Australia's case of white colonial settler state? This is despicable. We have to have no respect for this legality.

Therefore, imprints will break the law. And then on the other side, you've got perhaps social democrats or perhaps small liberals or what have you, who basically respect the legitimacy and sovereignty of the legal system and who are in principle reluctant to have a break the law. The problem is both of these sides fetishize an aspect of the social totality. The law.

And both of these sides don't recognize that the law is contingent. It's historically produced and it's the historical product of a particular class. Although the fetishism of illegality fetishizes the law, I guess through abstract negation of the law. But you can still see that the relationship to law is the primary overarching concept for people who fetishize legality.

So the conscious argument is, well, if we understand the historical origins of this legal system, if we understand its role in terms of the social totality, then this gives us the ability to think freely within the law and make, I guess, an indifferent decision. Do we break the law? Do we not? Well, that's really based on the existence of the situation.

Most of the time, no, it's really bad idea. Sometimes they, yes, you need to be distracted to victory, even if that means breaking the law. And so if communists have this kind of understanding of these concepts, I guess we can use our concepts without being used by them, you know, and there's many other examples of this kind of thing. But that's the kind of, I guess, intellectual training Lukas wanted the communist movement to impart to its members.

Did it really do that? Not really. In Europe in the 20s? Obviously, it's pretty straight.

I think it was the massive of communist in Europe in the 20s were certainly people who had a strong intellectual commitment to understanding the world. But, you know, aside from a couple of important thinkers, it was a pretty dogmatic movement. You know, I think Lukas's argument for Marxist theory and a return to philosophy as well. I think it fell on largely diffies.

Yeah, so moving along, so that brings us through a lot of the kind of theoretical reconstruction you do in this book of Lukas' 1920s work. But then you have a long series of sections where you go through a series of critiques people have raised about Lukas and for people interested in that, I would highly recommend this book because you go through a dozen or so different critics looking at the different ways they've kind of found limitations with his thought and responded to it. So this will be, I think, a really useful book for people who are well read in Lukas, but want to see how he's been responded to. But to kind of try and talk a bit about some of the overarching or key critiques, I want to quote you shortly.

You write, quote, Lukas' philosophy was formed at a distance from the practice upon which it purported to base itself. At no point did Lukas attempt to make himself the spokesperson for any other praxis. Thus, a pernicious chasm existed between philosophy of praxis and praxis. And the above section illustrated the violence wrought by history on Lukas' philosophy as penalty for this chasm.

Can you maybe unpack this split people found between Lukas' actual praxis and his philosophical developments? What did they see as the problem or limitation here that he failed to really step into? Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, because that passage that you read out in some ways, that's the critique of Lukas that I would put forward.

So I'll talk about that perhaps a little bit in a second, but it does relate to how other critics of Lukas have spoken about him and spoken about his philosophy of praxis. I guess, look, the story, with that's concerned, begins in the commentary as well. The first critics of Lukas' philosophy of praxis were Comintern intellectuals. You know, like Abraham de Boren, who was a philosopher in the Soviet Union, formerly a manchevic.

He read Hagel, but he read the philosophy of nature. Some books should be left on the shelf, and I suspect probably de Boren's among them. And he, by criticizing Lukas, he was very, very, quite consciously doing the bidding of Gregorizi Novyev, part of the Russian leadership of the Comintern, who saw Lukas' intellectuals like that as a threat. And again, de Boren's position was mirrored by such Democrats, by Hungarian writers, and interestingly later on, by the Frankfurt School.

So you get someone like, I don't know, saying that, well, Lukas is effectively a latter day fitter. He wants to liquidate all objectivity into pure subjectivity. And, you know, if you're a Soviet critic of Lukas, you do not criticize his altruism. Instead, you say, you know, he's an idealist, he's an ultra leftist, and he's anti-Leninist.

Or is if you're someone like, oh, no, someone that was influenced by the Frankfurt School, you say, well, he's an idealist, he's a Hegelian, and this is related to his altruism, which we don't like. So that became the standard line on Lukas' throughout the 20th century. Now, in a sense, there's a grain of truth in some of these criticisms, but I think the big problem is they just failed to grasp Lukas' whole, and they failed to read the guy terribly. There's a weird anxiety to criticize Lukas for the majority of commentators throughout the 20th century.

And they don't really extend a lot of intellectual generosity to the guy. There's a few, like there's a minority position, which is what I go through in the book of Melaponte Iswan, like, you know, this block had a beautiful review of Lukas, obviously, in the 20th century. There's a handful of other people that look at the guy well. But the critics, you know, Andrew Radow and Paul Brien, two sort of new left critics of Lukas, who do read him better than most.

But sort of what they say, they point to, what they say, well, the working class was not the subject of object of history. You know, this is a tribute to the working class, God likes that, this isn't going to really happen. They also have a sort of very, very new left criticism of the extent to which that posits a class reduction in the picture of the world. And, you know, they're kind of, like, they're the kind of theorists that sort of want to multipleity of different movements, you know, emerging, challenging, different things simultaneously, but not in a united way.

So they say they direct reject some of the totalizing gestures within Lukas' philosophy as well. So they'll say, well, the working class could never play this role, they never play this role. So to paper over the gap between what Lukas expected of the proletariat, and what the proletariat could actually do, they argue that Lukas created a counter of the party. Well, Lukas substituted the party for the proletariat, and that in fact the party, he substituted philosophy for the party, ultimately.

So they would argue that, you know, in the end he had an authoritarian account of the party because it had to make up for a lack present in the workers movement. See, the problem with that is Lukas' vision of the party in the class was highly, highly democratic, and there's a thousand different steps he points to between the party and the class. I mean, you know, like, it wasn't irrational in his name to think that. Like, the working class in Russia had just formed a workers government, it's obvious at the top.

So there are criticisms we might have had, I think, but like in the same, this was on the cards in Germany. There was a vast workers council movement. So, you know, the working class was actually impacting on history and was doing so in a unified manner, led by mass working class parties, which were very different from the monolithic style in the studies that, you know, predominated in the 30s. Now, they were actually parties made up of people who debated each other and listened to each other.

They weren't authoritarian parties. They may have been dogmatic, but they weren't authoritarian. So, you know, this said, the thing that I'm getting at in the thing that you, the quote that you read out is a little different, but it does relate. So, and it sort of, it does presuppose the theoretical status of the concept of praxis within Lukaszha's whole philosophy.

So, actual praxis, that is the thing that de-refeies the world. And in fact philosophy itself is a rarefied way of looking at the world, because it is, well, in Lukaszha's language, it's the development of the abstract rationality of capitalism to a point where it can reflect upon itself and its own abstract rationality and grasp the need to immerse itself within history in order to become actual and become concrete and to cease to be schematic. So, he's got this nice quote that, you know, in basically like there are two ultimate possibilities for philosophy, rarefied universe, platonic idealism or kind of Nietzschean relativism. You know, the latter dissolves everything into a flux and it's a kind of persecivism, which, you know, it's sort of abandoned reason.

Whereas the platonic idealism, he argues, is the more rational one and it's the superior one, but it creates an ideological schematic that's divorced from the world. He sort of says, that's where Hegel ends up. Well, to overcome that, that's a philosophy. Philosophy itself has to emerge into history in the form of mass movement, the working-class movement.

And so, praxis is the term, it's the highest truth. You know, it's higher than the abstract truth of philosophy for Lukaszha. Well, so this is all fair and good, but in which case, how can the philosopher express what praxis is? Because the fully critical and self-aware philosopher praxis like Lukaszha understands the abstraction of the vantage point from which they're writing.

And he understands that he's the theorist who's a philosopher. He is writing what he's writing has a strong element of verification within it. And he's writing after praxis. So he's representing the concept of praxis.

Or he's building a philosophy based on his concept and based on a recollection and a reflection upon real history that happened. So there is already and always a gap between the praxis upon which he built his system and the system itself. And I think, well, that gap got worse over time. I mean, there's practical elements to this.

Like there's no Communist Party that embraced Lukaszha in Marxism. Lukaszha in Marxism has never been a practical trend within the left. It's more that people within the left read Lukaszha to spice up their theoretical life when they get bored of the synthetics. And philosophers and academics read Lukaszha.

So that was an issue. But then, if your philosophy of praxis is based upon historical example of praxis like 1917, the further way you get from 1917, the more pernicious the gap grows. And this effectively means that philosophy praxis, its role, you know, read it, reading Lukaszha with a total fidelity to the text and then trying to construct sort of the most rigorously cush possible. If you're going to be an orthodox Lukasian, the only thing to do in philosophy is to remember the Russian Revolution.

That's pretty nostalgic. You know, that's pretty, I think, really nihilistic. And that can be applied with a Messianic theory. You know, it's a big Christian, really like Christ's 9th Russians, or the Russian Revolution 9th Russians.

Maybe this is appealing for your trust. And then one day it will be reborn. And it will be reborn because we've preserved the correct program or we've preserved the correct theory from it. Well, this, I think, ends up using historical event effectively as a bearer of the inside of the theorist who's probably just a bit of an isleth, who's trapped in a quite nostalgic viewpoint.

So in a sense, I'd like to relative, basically, this gets into the point, you know, some argument about Lukaszha instead of saying the praxis has to be the bearer of truth. Say, and then, you know, the bearer of a standpoint that's beyond the ideology of which society, why don't we simply say, well, we practice the philosophical method that understands how to mediate the contradictions within ideology that impact us because of which society. And this can generate a vantage point that is always within the present that can then critically reflect on our concepts. So within that, and I just wrote the other week, article on the concept of praxis, trying to outline this approach to it.

This means we can have a concept of praxis, but we can try and use it critically so that we're not simply using it as a bearer for whatever insight we're trying to articulate. So that we acknowledge the role of the philosopher within articulating a philosophy of praxis. Another critique you bring up regarding Lukasz. We talked about the four elements of theory for him, the praxis mediation totality and genesis.

Now for Lukasz, his Hegelianism for him, he had you hold these theoretical elements together in sort of a dialectical unity. But you point out that in opening this up as kind of something that theory needs to do, you also point out that a number of critics have pointed out that he failed to actually do it they failed to kind of hold together for him. And then what you end up with is kind of to use the Hegelese is just abstract negativity. So can you unpack this kind of theoretical dead end that Lukasz got into, you know, in spite of the kind of theoretical ambitions he had he failed to kind of follow through on them.

Yeah, this is really interesting because, okay, there's a preface to my answer. A incorrect theory can usually evolve in a number of different directions. So I'm kind of against readings of Lukasz's life which identify his later trajectory as the necessary result of his 1920s philosophy. But that's it, there is a connection between the two, and I'll talk about that in a little in a second.

But then the other point I wanted to make is, well, okay, so if you're a Hegelian, there's a role for a concept of practicing Hegelian philosophy and I'm a Marxist, so there's a lot about Hegel who needs to change. But you don't want to practice to be the highest concept, rather absolute method or the speculative method is the highest vantage point within philosophy. And this, it's not an impurious perspective, it's not a perspective that claims to know everything about politics, it's a perspective that is practiced off criticism, and that which is why it's a method, you know, it's not an all-encompassing system of knowing everything. It depends on the vision of Hegel you like, this is a more left-egalian position, it's a Chilean-Rise position, not that it's a young-egalian position, I think they're different, but let's leave that aside.

Whereas if you look at what practice to do this time, to do this work, well then what happens when practice doesn't exist anymore, it's the 1930s, practice is not going well. And Lukasz is quite aware of this too, I think there's a very anti-salanist current within his book on the young Hegel. But so if practice isn't going well, but yet you want to preserve a philosophy of practice, then one of the issues is mediation, totality and genesis, those are the three concepts. They're vouchsafed by the concept of praxis, and they're vindicated by actual praxis.

So without praxis, the relationships between these different concepts start to break down. To give you a sense of what that means, well, outside of the era of praxis, we may well be able to say the social totality is being created historically, it's a series of alienated social relationships that's susceptible to practical transformation. We may well be able to say here's a concept of logic of history, without actual praxis, we can't test any of these hypotheses concrete, in fact we can't really go beyond abstract generalities. We can't start to say, well here's how we transform things, here's what the concrete relationships that we will introduce instead of capitalist relationships are.

So it's just stuck in attraction, or maybe moral criticism, things. There's different pathways you can go down. So for Lukas, to give an example of what this means, I'll talk maybe about Lukas, and he resolved this problem. And he's significant because he was really intellectually honest.

He chose to stay in the Soviet Union and you can tell that decision if you want, but really, who was doing well in the 1930s? There's pretty much no one who didn't make some compromising decision in the 1930s. So every state in the Soviet Union, and it's not a free place to be, the agreement is effectively that he stops doing politics and he stops talking about the contemporary world. It's in place of agreement because he's hyper-fuling intellectual, but I want to just kill him.

They came pretty close a few times, like they did a rest in general, but he thought that was good for him, but he got out of life. So the agreement is not doing politics and you can do philosophy and literary criticism. And he becomes fairly conservative and literate, you know, the sort of standard. And Lukas is obviously famous for the standard Lukas line from the 30s onwards being, well, it's not social realist, it's not socialism.

And so he doesn't like communism, he doesn't like Kafka, he doesn't like this stuff. But leave that aside. So even though he makes these intellectual and political compromises, he does feel a need to work through the limitations of his earlier theory. Now, I think he doesn't agree with the way he does it, but it's an instructive, it's instructive the way he does it.

So Reddit is more radical in his 1920s philosophy. The thing that makes Marxism true, at the end of the day, is not its capacity for analysis, it's not, you know, it's ability to make predictions, it's not, you know, a scientific method inherited from bourgeois social sciences. The thing that makes Marxism true at the end of the day for history class consciousness is the actual practice of the working class. We mean, 1970s, this is what underpins the truth claims of Marxism, right?

So if you abandon that, well, it's going to be in the truth claims of Marxism. There's different options out there, like if you're empiricist, you know, if you're a social democratic theorist, you might say, oh, well, you know, we have a scientific analysis of society and he's all this data. But look, I just want to do that. So instead, he sort of says, well, there are two things that makes Marxism true after this point.

The historic existence of the proletariat from Marx's day onwards. So instead of saying it's the concrete praxis of a particular work of movement, he just says, no, it's just the social existence of the proletariat. This makes Marxism impossible as a viewpoint. And then the critic of political economy.

So effectively, he says, you know, Marx, and he becomes obsessed with like Marx's development and how Marx became Marx. And he says, well, what makes Marxism true? Marx criticizes political economy. He learned from German idealism and criticized that as well.